On this common background stands out in striking relief a population of
distinct living figures, illuminated by an intense light. This creative
power is Shakespeare's great gift, and it communicates an extraordinary
significance to his words. Every phrase pronounced by one of its
characters enables us to see, besides the idea which it contains and the
emotion which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and the entire
character which produced it--the mood, physical attitude, bearing, look
of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and force approached
by no one. The words which strike our ears are not the thousandth part
of those we hear within; they are like sparks thrown off here and there;
the eyes catch rare flashes of flame; the mind alone perceives the vast
conflagration of which they are the signs and the effect. He gives us
two dramas in one: the first strange, convulsive, curtailed, visible;
the other consistent, immense, invisible; the one covers the other so
well, that as a rule we do not realize that we are perusing words: we
hear the roll of those terrible voices, we see contracted features,
glowing eyes, pallid faces; we see the agitation, the furious
resolutions which mount to the brain with the feverish blood, and
descend to the sharp-strung nerves. This property possessed by every
phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and forms, comes from the fact
that the phrase is actually caused by a world of emotions and images.
Shakespeare, when he wrote, felt all that we feel, and much besides. He
had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the eye a
complete character, body, mind, past and present, in every detail and
every depth of his being, with the exact attitude and the expression of
face, which the situation demanded. A word here and there of Hamlet or
Othello would need for its explanation three pages of commentaries; each
of the half-understood thoughts, which the commentator may have
discovered, has left its trace in the turn of the phrase, in the nature
of the metaphor, in the order of the words; nowadays, in pursuing these
traces, we divine the thoughts. These innumerable traces have been
impressed in a second, within the compass of a line. In the next line
there are as many, impressed just as quickly, and in the same compass.
You can gauge the concentration and the velocity of the imagination
which creates thus.
These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross or
delicate, witty or stupid, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of
spirit which is his own. He has made of them imaginative people, void of
will and reason, impassioned machines, vehemently jostled one against
another, who were outwardly whatever is most natural and most abandoned
in human nature. Let us act the play to ourselves, and see in all its
stages this clanship of figures, this prominence of portraits.
Lowest of all are the stupid folk, babbling or brutish. Imagination
already exists there, where reason is not yet born; it exists also there
where reason is dead. The idiot and the brute blindly follow the
phantoms which exist in their benumbed or mechanical brains. No poet has
understood this mechanism like Shakespeare. His Caliban, for instance, a
deformed savage, fed on roots, growls like a beast under the hand of
Prospero, who has subdued him. He howls continually against his master,
though he knows that every curse will be paid back with "cramps and
aches." He is a chained wolf, trembling and fierce, who tries to bite
when approached, and who crouches when he see's the lash raised. He has
a foul sensuality, a loud base laugh, the gluttony of degraded humanity.
He wishes to violate Miranda in her sleep. He cries for his food, and
gorges himself when he gets it. A sailor who had landed in the island,
Stephano, gives him wine; he kisses his feet, and takes him for a god;
he asks if he has not dropped from heaven, and adores him. We find in
him rebellious and baffled passions, which are eager to rise again and
to be satiated. Stephano had beaten his comrade. Caliban cries, "Beat
Him enough: after a little time I'll beat him too." He prays Stephano to
come with him and murder Prospero in his sleep; he thirsts to lead him
there, dances through joy and sees his master already with his "weasand"
cut, and his brains scattered on the earth:
"Prithee, my king, be quiet. See'st thou here,
This is the mouth o' the cell: no noise, and enter.
Do that good mischief which may make this island
Thine own forever, and I, thy Caliban,
For aye thy foot-licker."[651]
Others, like Ajax and Cloten, are more like men, and yet it is pure mood
that Shakespeare depicts in them, as in Caliban. The clogging corporeal
machine, the mass of muscles, the thick blood sluggishly moving along in
the veins of these fighting men, oppress the intelligence, and leave no
life but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat;
that is his existence; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much
as a bull is jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained
and led by Ulysses, without looking before him: the grossest flattery
decoys him. The Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge.
Behold him puffed up with pride, scorning to answer anyone, not knowing
what he says or does. Thersites cries, "Good-morrow, Ajax"; and he
replies, "Thanks, Agamemnon." He has no further thought than to
contemplate his enormous frame, and roll majestically his big stupid
eyes. When the day of the fight has come, he strikes at Hector as on an
anvil. After a good while they are separated. "I am not warm yet," says
Ajax, "let us fight again."[652] Cloten is less massive than this
phlegmatic ox; but he is just as idiotic, just as vainglorious, just as
coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by his insults and his scullion
manners, tells him that his whole body is not worth as much a
Posthumus's meanest garment. He is stung to the quick, repeats the words
several times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it again and
again with his head down, like an angry ram:
"_Cloten._ 'His garment?' Now, the devil--
_Imogen._ To Dorothy my woman hie thee presently--
_C._ 'His garment?'... You have abused me: 'His meanest
garment!'... I'll be revenged: 'His meanest garment!' Well."[653]
He gets some of Posthumus's garments, and goes to Milford Haven,
expecting to meet Imogen there. On his way he mutters thus:
"With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her: first kill him, and in
her eyes; there shall she see my valor, which will then be a torment to
her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his
dead body, and when my lust has dined--which, as I say, to vex her I
will execute in the clothes that she so praised--to the court I'll knock
her back, foot her home again."[654]
Others again, are but babblers: for example, Polonius, the grave
brainless counsellor; a great baby, not yet out of his "swathing
clouts"; a solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels,
compliments, and maxims; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in
grand ceremonies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout
words. But the most complete of all these characters is that of the
nurse in "Romeo and Juliet," a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular
kitchen oracle, smelling of the stewpan and old boots, foolish,
impudent, immoral, but otherwise a good creature, and affectionate to
her nurse-child. Mark this disjointed and never-ending gossip's babble:
"_Nurse._ 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour.
_Lady Capulet._ She's not fourteen....
_Nurse._ Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she--God rest all Christian souls!--
Were of an age: well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me: but, as I said,
On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.
'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean'd--I never shall forget it--
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua:--
Nay, I do bear a brain:--but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!
Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge:
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow."[655]
Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four
times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her head, and
cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless repetitions
are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the straight line of
reasoning and of the story; they repeat their steps, as it were merely
marking time: struck with an image, they keep it for an hour before
their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do advance, they turn
aside to a hundred subordinate ideas before they get at the phrase
required. They allow themselves to be diverted by all the thoughts which
come across them. This is what the nurse does; and when she brings
Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies her, less from a wish
to tease than from a habit of wandering from the point:
"_Nurse._ Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
_Juliet._ How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?
Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that;
Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance:
Let me be satisfied: is't good or bad?
_N._ Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose
a man: Romeo! no, not he: though his face be better than any man's,
yet his legs excels all men's; and for a hand and a foot, and a body,
though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is
not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb.
Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you dined at home?
_J._ No, no: but all this did I know before.
What says he of our marriage? what of that?
_N._ Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
My back o' t'other side--O, my back, my back!
Beshrew your heart for sending me about,
To catch my death with jaunting up and down!
_J._ I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.
Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love?
_N._ Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and
a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous--Where is your
mother?"[656]
It is never-ending. Her gabble is worse when she comes to announce to
Juliet the death of her cousin and the banishment of Romeo. It is the
shrill cry and chatter of an overgrown asthmatic magpie. She laments,
confuses the names, spins roundabout sentences, ends by asking for
_aqua-vitœ._ She curses Romeo, then brings him to Juliet's chamber.
Next day Juliet is ordered to marry Earl Paris; Juliet throws herself
into her nurse's arms, praying for comfort, advice, assistance. The
other finds the true remedy: Marry Paris,
"O, he's a lovely gentleman!
Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second match.
For it excels your first."[657]
This cool immorality, these weather-cock arguments, this fashion of
estimating love like a fishwoman, completes the portrait.